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Posts Tagged ‘Paris Hilton’

It’s on: Not since Madonna’s smack down with Paris Hilton over Kabbalah has there been such an intriguing match-up of big-name narcissists as the potential U.S. Senate brawl between Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina – both of whom probably thought that song was about her.

Fiorina’s self-aggrandizing style has been well chronicled in stories about her destructive reign as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. And Boxer, whose shameless self-regard recently popped out in her public dressing down of a Pentagon officer who dared call her “ma’am” instead of “Senator,” has recently written yet another cheesy political thriller that admiringly focuses on her alter ego, Ellen Fischer (guess who’s the “honest, tough and energetic” U.S. Senator?).

At a time when California’s unemployment is soaring and its public schools are going down the toilet, there’s something vaguely creepy about the state’s junior senator tooling around with an entourage to book readings as she tries to cash in on her office with fine writing like this swooning recollection of the first glimpse her heroine’s hubby had of her:

“Listen, ever since I saw you across that room, fighting for your children’s bill with every nerve in your body, I’ve loved you and wanted you and I can’t stand the thought of losing you.”

Whoa – peeping legislative posturing makes you hot? Duuude!

As Kimberley Strassel wrote about Boxer’s “Blind Trust” in a Wall Street Journal review, the book “begs to be read less as a thriller than as an attempt to score real-life political points in fictional form.”

Carla Takes On Carly: As a novelist, Boxer is, um, a really good politician. No matter what you think of her, she certainly paid her political dues, as a county supervisor and a member of congress, before stepping up to run for Senate, unlike Fiorina.

Yet from Boxer’s first, down-to-wire campaign against the mercurial Bruce Herschensohn in 1992, she has been routinely underrated by Republicans. Every six years, they think they’ve found the guy who can knock her off, and this time out, Fiorina is the guy being anointed by establishment GOPers such as Texas Senator John Cornyn, chair of the Republican Senatorial campaign committee. Unlike some of the other stiffs that Boxer’s vanquished, Fiorina at least will offer her a serious challenge in the swollen head sweepstakes.

“One is hard-pressed,” ABC-News Silicon Valley columnist Michael Malone wrote of Fiorina, “to think of anything she did during her time at either Lucent or HP that wasn’t designed to burnish her own image — at the sacrifice of anyone who got in her way.”

Be that as it may, the famously failed and fired CEO Fiorina does know a thing or three about product launches, so the rocky roll-out of her nascent Senate candidacy this week can’t have pleased her very much.

For starters, there was this roundhouse right attack by party rival Chuck DeVore, whose slashing style makes Steve Poizner look like the Dali Lama. Then came a total takedown by the ubiquitous Carla Marinucci, who added to her previous reportage about Fiorina’s spotty California voting record the new news that the would-be Senator never voted in the 1980s and 1990s, when she lived in Maryland and New Jersey.

The final epee cut to the rookie contender came from Michael Finnegan of the By God L.A. Times, who graced his yarn with a fine example of proper technique in employing the understated story kicker: “Fiorina was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a rocky tenure.” As Brian Leubitz put it in Calitics: “Ouch”

Speaking of entitlements: It’s disappointing to learn that San Francisco Mayor and wannabe governor Gavin Newsom views as a state secret the public costs of the cops who follow him everywhere, including on his campaign travels.

Let’s be clear that we don’t begrudge Newsom a round-the-clock security detail, especially given San Francisco’s history of violence against public officials. But refusing to disclose the bill taxpayers are footing, on top of his years-long resistance to releasing his daily mayoral calendars, suggests a petulant disregard for transparency in government, a troubling trait for an elected official at any level, let alone a governor.

The mayor’s office contends that releasing such information could compromise Newsom’s security and put him at risk, an argument that doesn’t seem to fly with the U.S. Secret Service or other big city mayors.

The Prince of Pride’s obstinacy on the issue has won him an extended beef with S.F. Supe Ross Mirkarimi, who’s sponsoring an ordinance that would not only make the mayor disclose how much his personal protection on the campaign trail costs taxpayers, but also require him to reimburse the city for the politicking portion of his security bill.

“If he’s campaigning outside the city, there’s a question of commingling taxpayers’ money with his campaign,” Mirkarimi told us. “It’s good public policy that we recover those funds.”

Press Clips: Not sure who Tom Campbell knows at the Journal, but he got himself a big sloppy wet kiss this week trumpeting his bid for the Republican nomination for governor, in which a whole brigade of unnamed “analysts” offered a rosy view of Dudley Do Right’s chances…The always worth reading Nate Silver offers a forecast that should keep Nancy Pelosi awake at night — “While the Democrats are not extraordinary likely to lose the House, such an outcome is certainly well within the realm of possibility” –- over at FiveThirtyEight.com… Check out California’s Capitol, where Deadhead Greg Lucas turned off the iPod long enough to analyze the true shakiness of the just completed budget deal.

Scoop of the week: Green with envy kudos to the Chron’s irrepressible Carla Marinucci for her blog disclosure that AG Jerry Brown has insinuated his office into an investigation of the role of prescription drugs in the Michael Jackson case. In revealing that General Jerry has waded into what the tabs like to call your Jacko Death Probe, Ms. Carla managed to skillfully boost her Google Juice ratings by tossing in a couple of gratuitous links to Anna Nicole Smith.

What the Whirling Dervish of Daily Journalism failed to report, however, is that the MJ Drug Deal is just one of many high profile, celeb legal matters being eyed by the once-and-future candidate for governor. Breathing the rarefied air of political PR nirvana, Brown is poised to launch investigations into a half-dozen other has-been scandals and mysteries, sources close to our imagination told Calbuzz:

Did OJ really search for the real killer? With Simpson safely on ice in Nevada, Brown’s crack celebrity investigation team is focusing on allegations the broken-down jock broke interstate commerce laws by fraudulently accepting free greens fees, after telling golf course operators in multiple states his chief suspect was playing on their back nine.

Kate Moss and the missing flatware. Everybody knows that super-model Kate Moss used coke on a fashion shoot a few years back, but only Brown’s office has doggedly pursued the possibility of filing grand theft charges against Moss for allegedly leaving the scene with a spoon belonging to the on-location caterer stuck up her nose.

Did David Hasselhoff defame Wendy’s? Brown has long believed that law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions blundered by turning a blind eye to possible Product Disparagement civil law violations by burned-out Baywatch star David Hasselhoff, who was famously taped trying to get his choppers around a Baconator while falling down drunk, a video that may have sent sales of the once-popular Wendy’s menu item plummeting.

Was Britney’s buzz cut legal? Acting on a tip from an anonymous informant in the high-end L.A. cosmetology industry, Brown is reportedly close to filing charges against the pop princess for not reimbursing a Tarzana hair salon for the use of high speed clippers with which she whacked off all her hair a few years back. With interest, Brown investigators say, the tab by now may well be close to the mid-three figures.

David Duchovny’s sex addiction scam. Brown’s undercover agents have developed confidential information that after “X Files” star Duchovny was released from rehab for sex addiction, he plotted to fleece and seduce thousands of gullible libertines by inviting them to join him in steamy sessions of a new, scam 12-step program.

Paris Hilton, parking scofflaw. While Paris the Heiress paid her dues for her DUI, lawman Brown has developed evidence that since getting sprung from L.A. County lock-up, she’s failed to pay multiple parking tickets on her Hummer hybrid, including several violations for not curbing her wheels and, at least once, for leaving it on the wrong side on street cleaning day.

Lockyer channels Al Franken: Just when he seemed to be emerging as the only grown-up in Sacramento, Treasurer Bill Lockyer’s brain was seized by his inner adolescent and he jumped with both feet into the Capitol’s budget pie fight.

In an interview with the L.A. Times Sacramento bureau Lockyer suggested the way out of the mess was to pass two budgets – one for the enlightened libs of coastal California and one for the knuckle-draggers everywhere else:

“We’ll have the budget for the coast that has tax increases and services,” Lockyer told the Turgid Times. “And in a bunch of other areas in Central and Southern California that don’t have tax increases … their public schools are closed a month of the year – and see what happens.”

“If people in Orange County aren’t going to vote for a state budget, I don’t know why you shouldn’t sell [UC Irvine] to Google,” he said. “Why is there a DMV office in Riverside? Those folks ought to figure out how to go to L.A. at night to renew their driver’s license.”

At a time when Lockyer’s loyal fans are fanning flames of speculation about him making a late entry into the governor’s race by occupying the considerable space in the moderate middle, his sudden left turn lurch in trashing half of California’s population as a bunch of know-nothings is baffling; that Lockyer is the guy who has to go out and sell California bonds to a bunch of Wall Street suits who find the state’s fiscal crisis less than amusing makes his Alfred E. Newman act even more inexplicable.

eMeg’s Mixed Message: While Meg Whitman’s spin posse is busy trumpeting her $6.5 million fundraising haul as evidence that she’s connecting with Real Voters, her web site still tells another, very different tale: that her Megness lives in terror of sitting down to answer questions from California reporters who understand state issues.

On her home page, the “Meg in the News” feature lists these four media interviews:

All Politico All the Time: Big week for Politico, the Beltway obsessive’s best online friend, which scored a trifecta of triumphs. First, Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff abandoned his normal cranky skepticism in a fluffy profile that declares the throwback journalism guys who launched Politico “may have solved the future of news.”

Next, a few days before Sarah Palin’s abrupt resignation as Alaska governor, Politico’s Jonathan Martin chronicled the cat fight of the year which broke out between always-wrong-from-the-right bloviator Bill Kristol and California consultant Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s failed presidential effort; the brawl followed publication of a 10,000 word takedown of Palin in Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, aka Mr. Dee Dee Myers.

Then Politico scored again with a very cool story by Michael Falcone that put the recent sexcapades of Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. John Ensign into political cultural context by recounting how they’re just two of a number among the Republican congressional class of 1994 to have fallen considerably short of the moral superiority values preached by that “Take Back America” crowd.